


Circular Logic

by provocative_envy



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Future Fic, Getting Together, Multi, POV Multiple, Pining, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 00:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17110943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: Because the collateral damage might be hard to quantify, but Harvey’s pretty sure he has a monopoly on it.





	Circular Logic

**Author's Note:**

> written for [@amyjake](http://www.amyjake.tumblr.com/) for the CAOS Secret Santa exchange. happy holidays, i really hope you enjoy this!
> 
> xoxo
> 
> ETA: i wrote most of this before i got around to watching the christmas special, and it's technically only canon compliant up to maybe the first 20 minutes of S1E10.

* * *

 

Sixteen is an end.

Sixteen is a beginning.

Sixteen is light and dark, a triumph and a tragedy, the sun bleeding into the moon and the stars burning up in the sky—sixteen is squarely planting one foot in the future and one foot in the past and refusing on stubborn, desperate principle to concede even a single inch in either direction.

Sixteen is petrifying.

Sixteen is boundless.

And there are two sides to a coin, sure, heads or tails, fifty-fifty—

But there are _three_ to every story.

 

* * *

 

Harvey’s thought a lot about time, lately.

Time travel.

Time machines.

The shivering whisper of a clock hand creeping, waiting, ticking; he could wind it back and back, could erase his memory, could return to a simpler, easier, better version of his own life, one where he got to keep Sabrina, got to keep his _brother_ , got to keep his grip on a reality that wasn’t constantly shifting, constantly jerking him around—a fault line without an end point, an earthquake without a warning.

Because the collateral damage might be hard to quantify, but Harvey’s pretty sure he has a monopoly on it.

“That yours?” Nicholas Scratch asks, nodding towards the shotgun Harvey had left lying on the dining room table.

There’s a preternaturally destructive storm raging outside, sirens blaring through the town square, and a pack of dead, angry witches roaming around in search of vengeance. Or justice. Harvey still can’t decide which side of that particular fight he’s going to wind up falling on.

“Uh,” he hedges, shoving his hands into his pockets and taking a surreptitious step backwards, away from Nicholas Scratch, who’s—

Well.

Nicholas Scratch, who’s pale and lean and sharp and the same kind of beautiful that Sabrina is—the kind of beautiful that Harvey now knows really is more ethereal, more otherworldly, more _magical_ than he could have ever even guessed.

Nicholas Scratch, who’s casually wrecking just about every last nerve Harvey’s always secretly believed he _had to_ possess, deep down, no matter what his dad liked to yell at him.

“Are you scared, Harvey?” Nicholas drawls, cocking his head, glancing with evident disinterest at the rattling windows, the rustling curtains. An eerie, blood-curdling shriek echoes from down the road. “Huh. You have a basement?”

“Um—yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, we have a basement,” Harvey manages to clarify. “What are you—did Sabrina _really_ send you?”

Nicholas snorts, flashing a smile that’s twice as sly and only about half as sweet as Sabrina’s but is still somehow _identical_ , all the same. A painful, aching, inexplicable reminder. It doesn’t really make any sense. Nothing does. Nothing has for a while.

And since opening the front door for Nicholas Scratch—since so much longer than that, if Harvey’s being honest with himself—he’s waffled between being consumed by a bittersweet spike of anger and a hapless, frantic swell of panic. He thinks, though, that he might finally know which one he’s going to settle on. Which one he’s going to succumb to.  

“You have no idea, do you,” Nicholas says, his voice rippling with a fleeting hint of something that might be wonder, but might also just be disdain. Harvey isn’t great with nuance. “What she risked for you. Where she _went_ for you.”

Harvey blinks his discomfort away, swallowing, trying not to fidget too obviously. “Look, I don’t need to explain my . . . why are you even _here,_ man? Are you her new—” He can’t quite get the word out, and the realization that he’s upset about it, about what it could mean, has him clenching his jaw, scowling down at Nicholas’s boots, at the polish of them, at the gleaming, reflective halo of the ominously flickering kitchen lights. “Why is this any of your business?”

Nicholas pauses, his expression thoughtful, his gaze borderline dangerous, and then he takes a decisive step forward, neatly eliminating the entirety of the space Harvey had tried to reclaim as his own. Nicholas is even better-looking up close, the angles and the shadows of his face, his features, sparking a confusing mishmash of curiosity and apprehension and heat in the pit of Harvey’s stomach, in the very tips of his fingers, because he wants to _draw_ Nicholas Scratch, he wants to trace and memorize and explore and—

“The thing people don’t understand about relationships,” Nicholas murmurs, leaning in, reaching around, flattening his palm against the dusty wood paneled wall, and he smells like ink and parchment and aftershave and the darkest parts of the forest at night, the parts Sabrina’s always liked best, “is that to make them work, you have to have _balance_. You have to share the good _and_ the bad, your strengths _and_ your weaknesses and your accomplishments and your mistakes, or else it just . . . disintegrates. Collapses. Like a mineshaft.”

Harvey flinches just as a riotous stampede of horses or footsteps or worse begins to rumble from outside.

“I’m really good at sharing, Harvey,” Nicholas continues, raising his eyebrows. “Are you?”

Harvey’s breath hitches.

 

* * *

 

Sabrina doesn’t _enjoy_ being relentlessly, unforgivingly suspicious of virtually every person she now comes into contact with, but she does enjoy being alive, and it turns out there’s a direct and undeniable correlation between the two.

“He’s just—some dramatic, middle-aged weirdo with a Dracula fetish,” Nicholas whispers to her, audibly exasperated. “He’s wearing a _cape_.”

Sabrina slants a disbelieving glare back over her shoulder, towards where Nicholas is slouched next to the nearest display shelf, his lips pursed and his posture lazy. He’s holding a black paper to-go cup of mulled cider, and his fingers are long and elegant, gracefully tapping out a distracting, unfamiliar rhythm.

“Yeah,” she says, inching furtively closer to the gap on the shelf between two heavy, leather-backed fantasy novels, craning her neck and arching up onto her toes so she can peek out at the rest of the store, “and you know who _else_ wears capes?”

Nicholas rolls his eyes. “Sabrina.”

“ _Nicholas_.”

“He’s a mortal.”

“So?”

“What do you—he can’t _hurt_ her.”

“Just like the _mortal witch hunters_ couldn’t hurt any of us?” Sabrina retorts as she watches _Dr. Cerberus_ throw his head back and laugh—too loudly, in her opinion—at whatever it is that Aunt Hilda is muttering to him. “I don’t care how harmless he seems, okay, there’s something _off_ about—”

“Sabrina?”

Sabrina freezes, her heart leaping into the back of her throat at the sound of that voice, at the memory of it, at the _suddenness_ of it—

Harvey is standing at the end of the aisle, the collar of his ugly corduroy jacket turned up, brushing the sparse patch of blond-red stubble she can see glinting along the hinge of his jaw; he has a stack of comic books under his arm, the wafer-thin plastic wrap crinkling as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and she can feel herself drinking in the sight of him, a crystal-clean oasis in the middle of a thousand-mile desert, a searing, complicated swirl of regret and protectiveness and guilt and yearning and self-consciousness seeping through her skin, inescapable, not unlike a sunburn.

“Harvey,” Sabrina says faintly. “ _Hi_.”

Nicholas stays quiet.

“Are you—” Harvey glances around, an adorable crescent-moon furrow in his brow. “Are you _spying_ on someone?”

Nicholas immediately starts to cough into his forearm, sloshing cider onto the cuff of his shirt, and Sabrina turns to stare at him, momentarily betrayed, mutinously wide-eyed, before she sidles a half-step backwards and stomps down on his toes with the chunky heel of her Mary Jane.  

“We’re checking up,” Sabrina blurts out. Nicholas is solid behind her, his free hand hovering, steady and sure, right above the small of her back. “On—on Aunt Hilda. She works here.”

Harvey’s gaze—warm and brown and attentive and the kind of earnest that can’t be faked—swivels between her face and Nicholas’s, dipping to her waist, her arms, her hips, all the places where her and Nicholas are almost, but not quite, touching; and Harvey doesn’t look _jealous_ , not exactly, but there’s a pinch to his mouth and a muscle ticking in his cheek and he does look—awkward. Uncertain. Frustrated. Like he’s shown up ten minutes late to take a test he’d forgotten to study for.

“Yeah, I know,” Harvey finally says, with one last stilted, inscrutable glance at Nicholas. “Uh—anyway—how, uh, how have you been? You’re at that new school full-time now, right? The, uh . . . the Academy?”

Sabrina laces her fingers together and squeezes hard enough that she can hear her knuckles creak. “Oh, it’s—fine. Good. Mostly fine.”

“That’s—that’s good, I’m glad,” Harvey says with an encouraging nod, before his lips tilt upwards in a tiny, teasing smile. “Or, is it—fine? Yeah? Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas cuts in, and there’s the furnace-hot flutter of his hand ghosting across the clinging red wool of Sabrina’s sweater, his thumb tapping out that same distracting, unfamiliar rhythm against the bend of her spine, “I mean, there’s a learning curve for everything, isn’t there, Harvey?”

Harvey’s expression cycles through a rapid-fire sequence of emotions that Sabrina can barely keep up with—irritation and puzzlement and fascination and a startling, flare-gun fizzle of _longing_ —

Harvey looks at her intently.

And then he looks at _Nicholas_ intently.

And then the bell above the door jingles merrily, and Dr. Cerberus’s strange, booming laugh pierces the air again, and Sabrina slowly untwists her fingers, shaking out the pins and needles.

 

* * *

 

Mortals, Nicholas has discovered, are _exhausting_.

They waste their boring, paltry lives lying to themselves about what they need and willfully depriving themselves of what they want. They prevaricate. They avoid. They _pine._ He’s studious by nature, more amenable than most would be to stints of careful observation rather than impulsive, impetuous action—but even _he_ has limits, lines he won’t cross, and it’s jarring to discover that he’s reached them. That he’s scraped the well of his own patience bleached-wall bare-bone dry.

Harvey Kinkle is smarter than he lets on, probably, but he has edges that are both sharper and darker than he likely realizes.

Sabrina, though—

She should _really_ have better instincts than this.

“Wow,” Nicholas drawls, settling comfortably into the passenger seat of Harvey’s truck. The engine is growling, rumbling, idling at an otherwise empty intersection, and Harvey is clutching the steering wheel with two white-knuckled fists, his gaping mouth and harried astonishment too gratifying—too satisfying—to not spare a few seconds to admire. “Small world, hey, Harvey?”

Harvey’s jaw works. “You—you just—the door was locked!”

Nicholas sighs. “Really? That’s your big argument?”

“You can’t just—just—that’s breaking and entering!”

“It’s a _car_.”

“With a _lock_.”

There’s a noticeable tremor in Harvey’s voice—desperation, maybe—that has Nicholas pausing, wondering, calculating; he doubts very much that Harvey’s frightened of _magic_ , specifically, that his rejection of Sabrina has anything at all to do with what she is and quite a bit more to do with what she’s _done_. Harvey’s frightened of something else. Something different. A perceived loss of—

Control.

Mortals love that, Nicholas knows; the idea of it, the projection of it, the care and keeping of it. They nurture their control like Nicholas might nurture a particularly complex, multi-layered spell, and they have a tendency to gravely overreact to circumstances that prove _beyond_ that control.

Harvey is a mortal.

Harvey is a _mortal_ , with all the accompanying baggage that entails.

“Sabrina loves you,” Nicholas says, licking his lips. “Very much.”

Harvey’s face—usually so open, so obvious—practically nails itself shut like a storm shutter. “Yeah,” he bites out, gaze pinned to the stoplight—still stubbornly red, a deep neon shade of it that would fit right in with all the vampire memorabilia in that awful little bookstore. “I know exactly how much Sabrina loves me.”

Nicholas clucks his tongue and scoots closer to Harvey, swatting a fraying gray seatbelt strap out of the way. “Love is an inherently selfish emotion,” he says blandly, blankly, bluntly, like he’s reciting a passage from a textbook. “The entire concept is predicated on the notion of one individual—or two, or three, or however many—being more _valuable_ than all the rest. Is that fair, Harvey?”

Harvey’s nostrils flare, his gaze darting with a prickling, helpless, searching kind of dismay towards the dwindling scrap of cracked, worn leather separating his thigh from Nicholas’s. “I don’t—if you’re blaming me for what Sabrina tried to—what she _wanted_ to—”

Nicholas makes an admonishing sound in the back of his throat. “That’s not what I’m doing at all.”

“Then what?” Harvey demands, flexing his fingers. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, Harvey.” Nicholas closes off the remaining distance between them, dropping his hand onto Harvey’s leg, nudging Harvey’s knee with his own, and the contact, the friction—just like he’d known it would be, suspected it would be, _hoped_ it would be—is electric. “All I’m saying is—if you’re going to love people, _really_ love them . . . you might as well be _selfish_ about it, right?”

Harvey blinks, seemingly nonplussed, seemingly enthralled by the sight of Nicholas’s hand, by its proximity to his own lap, before he gingerly shifts in his seat. Understanding is dawning, his pupils dilating, his chapped lips parting, a strand of his perpetually shaggy, windswept hair sticking out sideways, right behind his ear.  

The light turns green.

Harvey slams his foot down on the gas pedal, the locks on the doors clicking back into place.

Instinctively, Nicholas holds on for the ride, a laugh getting caught somewhere behind his tonsils, one hand gripping Harvey’s thigh, far too high up to be an accident, and the other—

Waiting.

Biding its time.

They’re almost there.

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
